Buffer's 2024 State of Remote Work surveyed 3,000 remote workers. The #1 challenge, cited for the fifth consecutive year: collaboration and communication across timezones. GitLab's remote work report puts it differently: distributed teams with less than 4 hours of daily overlap experience 2.3x more coordination failures than those with 6+ hours of overlap.
I run a distributed engineering studio. Our headquarters is in Lisbon, Portugal. Our engineering team is in Kyiv, Ukraine. Our clients are primarily in the US (East Coast and West Coast) and Europe. Timezone management is not an abstract concern for us. It is an operational reality that determines whether our clients' projects ship on time.
Why Timezones Break Teams
The feedback loop problem
Software development runs on feedback loops. A developer writes code. A reviewer reads it. The reviewer has questions. The developer answers. The reviewer approves. The code merges. In a co-located team, this cycle takes 2-4 hours. In a team with 6+ hours of overlap, it takes half a day. In a team with zero overlap, it takes 2-3 days.
A 2-3 day feedback loop on a code review means a 2-week sprint contains 5 review cycles instead of 20. The team ships 4x less. Not because the developers are slower. Because the reviews are slower. The bottleneck is not intelligence or skill. It is the clock.
The decision latency problem
Every software project encounters blocking decisions multiple times per day. "Should we use pagination or infinite scroll here?" "The third-party API changed its response format β do we adapt or switch providers?" "The product manager approved the mockup but the client wants a different flow."
In a co-located team, the developer walks over and asks. In an overlapping team, the developer sends a Slack message and gets an answer within the hour. In a non-overlapping team, the developer sends a message at 5 PM their time, the decision-maker reads it at 9 AM their time (which is 4 PM the developer's time), responds, and the developer sees the response the next morning. One question. Two business days. Multiply by 5 blocking decisions per week and you lose a full sprint of momentum every month to timezone delay.
The meeting tax
When a team spans 10+ hours of timezone difference, every synchronous meeting requires someone to work outside normal hours. The daily standup is at 7 AM for the developers and 5 PM for the client, or vice versa. Neither time is optimal. Over months, the early/late meeting schedule creates fatigue, resentment, and burnout.
Some teams solve this with async standups β recorded video updates, written status posts. These work for updates but fail for discussions. When a standup surfaces a blocker that requires a conversation, the async format adds another day of latency.
The Nearshore Advantage
Nearshore development exists specifically to solve the timezone problem. The term means "in a nearby timezone" β typically within 0-3 hours of the client's timezone.
For US clients, nearshore means Latin America (Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil) or Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Portugal). For European clients, nearshore means Eastern Europe or North Africa.
The key metric is not distance. It is overlap hours. A team with 6+ hours of daily overlap operates almost identically to a co-located team for collaboration purposes. Code reviews happen same-day. Blocking decisions are resolved within hours. Meetings happen during normal business hours for both sides.
Our team operates in EET (Eastern European Time, UTC+2) and WEST (Western European Summer Time, UTC+1 from Lisbon). For US East Coast clients, that is 7 hours ahead. Our working day (9 AM - 6 PM EET) overlaps with US Eastern business hours from 9 AM to 12 PM Eastern. That is 3 hours of direct overlap, plus our engineers routinely extend to 1-2 PM Eastern for standups and meetings. Effective overlap: 5+ hours.
For US West Coast clients, the overlap is tighter: 6 AM - 9 AM Pacific during our working hours, with engineers typically shifting their schedule 1-2 hours later to accommodate. Effective overlap: 4-5 hours.
For European clients (UK, Germany, France, Nordics), the overlap is nearly complete: 7-8 hours of shared business hours.
What 5+ Hours of Overlap Actually Means
Snapwire had a 30-person team split between Canada, California, and our 10 engineers in Ukraine. The overlap was sufficient for daily standups at 10 AM Eastern (5 PM Kyiv), sprint planning, retrospectives, and real-time code reviews. The team operated as one unit. The 10 EltexSoft engineers were indistinguishable from internal staff in terms of collaboration speed.
HeyTutor is based in Los Angeles. Our co-founder, serving as CTO, managed the schedule to maintain overlap: engineering standups in the morning Kyiv time (evening prior day in LA), strategic discussions in the afternoon Kyiv time (morning in LA). The engagement ran for 9 years on this schedule without timezone being a friction point.
MyFlyRight is based in Hamburg, Germany. 1 hour timezone difference from our Kyiv team. Effectively co-located for collaboration purposes. The 10-year partnership operated as if both teams were in the same office.
The Cost of Getting Timezones Wrong
The true cost of outsourcing increases by 15-30% when timezone overlap is insufficient. The communication tax (waiting for answers), the coordination overhead (async everything), and the quality gaps (building the wrong thing because clarification took 2 days instead of 2 hours) compound into real money.
A team at $25/hour with zero overlap and a 2-3 day feedback loop produces less value per dollar than a team at $60/hour with 6 hours of overlap and same-day feedback loops. The hourly rate is lower. The effective cost per shipped feature is higher. The project takes longer. The quality is lower because misunderstandings propagate for days before correction.
This is why the cheapest outsourcing rate is rarely the cheapest total cost. And it is why 59% of outsourcing engagements fail β skill mismatch is the #1 reason, but timezone-driven communication breakdown is a close contributor.
How to Evaluate Timezone Fit
Calculate real overlap
Not theoretical timezone difference. Real working-hours overlap. Ask the vendor: "What are your engineers' actual working hours? Will they adjust for our timezone? How many hours per day will we share?"
Minimum viable overlap for software development: 4 hours. Comfortable overlap: 6+ hours. Below 4 hours, you are paying for async overhead that erodes the cost savings.
Test the overlap before committing
During a paid trial sprint, pay attention to response times. How long does a Slack message take to get answered? How fast do code reviews complete? How many blocking decisions are delayed by timezone? If the trial reveals 24-hour feedback loops, the 12-month engagement will have the same problem at 26x the scale.
Factor timezone into total cost
When comparing vendors, do not compare hourly rates. Compare: hourly rate Γ estimated hours Γ timezone overhead multiplier. A team with zero overlap needs 15-30% more hours to produce the same output as a team with full overlap. Build that into the comparison.
$50/hour with 6 hours of overlap = $50/hour effective. $30/hour with 2 hours of overlap = $36-$39/hour effective (after the 20-30% overhead). $25/hour with 0 hours of overlap = $32-$37/hour effective.
The spread narrows dramatically when you account for timezone cost. The nearshore option is often cheaper in total than the offshore option, despite a higher hourly rate.
The EltexSoft Position
We are in Lisbon (UTC+0/+1) and Kyiv (UTC+2/+3). Our clients are primarily in the US and Europe. The overlap works:
US East Coast: 5+ hours daily overlap. US West Coast: 4-5 hours daily overlap. UK/Europe: 7-8 hours daily overlap.
Our $50-99/hour rate reflects senior engineers in a timezone that works for North American and European clients. The nearshore development guide has more detail on the model. The case studies β HeyTutor (LA), Snapwire (Toronto/CA), MyFlyRight (Hamburg) β are the proof that the overlap is sufficient for multi-year, high-output engineering partnerships.
Last updated June 9, 2024
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